Allow me to introduce myself

Hello to all of my soon to be loyal followers. My name is Mike Pare and I am a 4th year Journalism major at the University of Maine in Orono, Maine. This year I covered the UMaine basketball team for the school newspaper as they plodded along to another dissapointing, non-tournament, finish. I now find myself a basketball writer with no team to write about. Luckily for me, I do not pin my enjoyment of college basketball on the whims of the fickle America East conference. As much as I would love to see the Black Bears make a run some year, I probably have a better chance of getting a date with Meagan fox (Read: no chance).

So, like any young basketball fan that has grown up in the sports desert that is the state of Maine, I have branched out, forming affiliations with teams based on factors outside of a teams proximity to my hometown. Without boring you with the details of how these affiliations were formed, I have become a really big fan of Big East conference basketball--particularly the Villanova Wildcats and the UConn huskies. my love for these teams is balanced by my hatred for bigeast counterparts the louisville cardinals, and the Pitt Panthers. I will not qualify my hatred here except to say that both teams are annoyingly good and Rick Pitino is a franchise wrecker.

There is also a tendency to fall in love with a particular player on the college level and follow his team while he goes to that school. Players that have had this effect for me have been Dwayne Wade, Chris Paul, Sean May, Adam Morrison, Rajon Rondo, Greg Oden, Thaddeus Young, Kevin Love, Eric Gordon...and so on and so forth. Well the one player this year that I really find fun to follow is Oklahoma's Blake Griffin. I am certainly not alone in this, as he is the likely first pick in next years draft, and his explosive style of play makes him a highlight waiting to happen. He has the ability to dominate the college game right now like nobody else in the country, and I am really interested to see how far he can take the Sooners in the tournament.

With all that in mind, I do not profess my self to be a Doug Gottlieb or a Digger Phelps. I am no certified expert on college basketball as a whole, or even basketball as a whole for that matter. But I am a passionate and educated fan of the game. And fans know the most about the teams they love and follow. So instead of rehashing everything that I have heard an expert say about some mid major school that I had never even thought twice about until tourney time, I will limit my analysis to the teams that I love this year, and here they are, in alphabetical order listed with the teams star player.

Arizona Wildcats--PF Jordan Hill

Oklahoma Sooners--PF Blake Griffin

University of Connecticut Huskies--C Hasheem Thabeet

Villanova Wildcats--PG Scottie Reynolds

I have started this blog just in time for the NCAA basketball tournament, so stay tuned for a preview of how I think each team will fare this year.